Covid: a disaster for students and higher education

On 18 March 2020, the government announced that universities were to close two days later. All teaching then went online for the rest of the academic year. Exams were done at home. Extensive ‘no detriment’ policies were rapidly enacted so that students’ grades would not suffer even if their education did.

When the new academic year started in September, heavily socially distanced campuses opened for some teaching, although for many it remained solely or predominantly online. A switch to wholly online teaching for all was announced for 9 December, and has continued since. The only exception has been limited exemptions for certain practice-based subjects. As I write, the government has announced universities can reopen on a socially distanced basis on 17 May. For the vast majority of students, this is after their year’s teaching has finished.

Education has suffered greatly. Online teaching is simply not an adequate substitute for the lecture and seminar room in most cases. While lecturers were able to draw upon generally reliable online systems to hold virtual classes, in my opinion, this is not generally an adequate way to impart knowledge and cultivate students’ critical faculties. Mature and motivated students have coped, while weaker students and those less committed have struggled and in some cases not really engaged with their course.

Grade inflation

With poorer educational opportunities, one would expect grades to suffer. However, that was not the case for the 2019-20 academic year. In fact, 2020 degree classifications improved markedly. The number of firsts increased from 28 per cent in 2019 to 35 per cent in 2020. This is a result of the ‘no detriment’ policies put in place at the start of the pandemic. Typically, these ensured that grades achieved after the start of the pandemic would only count if they improved a student’s average over the year. It is likely that lecturers, well aware of the plight of the students – often presented as customers with defined ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘student experience’ expectations to be met – will have marked sympathetically and made informal allowances, too.

It is likely that formal and informal concessions made in the current academic year of 2020-21 will mean that high degree classifications from students who complete in 2021 will continue – these are students who both missed out due to Covid-19 and benefited from ‘no detriment’ policies and sentiment over each of their latter two years in the case of a three-year degree course. Coupled with loss of education through the (well justified) strikes during their studies, they have missed out greatly.

Many will deem this generosity to be fair, but as with school students who have missed out on important development in reading and writing, university students have also missed out on the development of expert knowledge in their field. If that is the case, should not grades fall to reflect that?

The context for considering that question is that, notwithstanding the single year prior to Covid-19, when university leaders acknowledged the issue, grade inflation has been a long standing phenomenon. A degree as something paid for and consumed vies with its role as an objective and consistent measure over time of knowledge and capability. Stating that standards should remain constant in these extraordinary circumstances can sound unfair given the difficulties that young people have experienced during the pandemic. But if a society locks down students, diminishing education as a result, it should be honest enough to admit the loss and look to make up for it through additional study opportunities.

Hybrid campus

Online learning has come to the fore. The World Economic Forum asserts that ‘It is clear that this pandemic has utterly disrupted an education system that many assert was already losing its relevance’ and makes the positive case for change. One online provider argues that the pandemic could be a ‘driver’ to ‘pivot faster and more effectively than ever before’ towards online provision. The advocacy of more online learning, often as part of asynchronous and ‘blended’ strategies, is shared very widely across the sector’s leaders, and is far from new. A greater role for it is often presented to lecturers as an orthodoxy and an inevitability, and this has support from some lecturers.

These changes have implications for universities, their staff and the campus itself, with one report floating the notion of a ‘hybrid campus’ with staff and students present a good deal less. There are pressures on many students that may make online learning attractive, and there is a place for it. However, my ‘new normal’ would be one where classroom time would be extended (and staffed) rather than diminished, and where virtual resources were built around that. It is especially important that staff are empowered to teach in the way they deem most effective to ensure universities develop a higher level of knowledge, skills and critical understanding.

The corollary of the advocacy of online encounters is the longstanding denigration of lectures, caricatured as simply a formal transmission of knowledge and not much more. There are pedagogic disagreements here, but I don’t accept the view of one learning technologist that that a lecture is ‘passive narrative learning’. Once the lecture has been stripped of its intellectual potential, and is presented as mere repetition of facts, it is not a leap to talk up online provision as its equal or superior. I hope that the discussion of teaching and learning post Covid-19 is led by academics’ views of knowledge rather than metrics, ‘learning outcomes’ or cost savings.

Exams and judgement

Assessment has had to adapt during Covid-19 too. Exams have often been done (if not replaced by other types of assessment) ‘at home’ over a number of days rather than in two or three hours in the lecture hall. Some have welcomed the forced shift from formal exams to ‘at home’ assessments, and see Covid-19 as an opportunity to move further in this direction. Indeed, the shift from exams to other forms of assessment (group work, presentations, posters, etc) is a long-term trend. Formal exams have often been caricatured as simply the regurgitation of others’ rote-learned ideas. This view rather assumes the critics have not stayed up late struggling to work through logical arguments and difficult concepts to prepare for them.

Judgement is an intrinsic aspect of a lecturer’s role, and formal written exams are often the best way to assess knowledge and understanding. The emerging ‘new normal’ should empower and encourage lecturers to teach and assess as they see fit – something we have been unable to do since March 2020. The approach to exams and assessment generally should be one we determine unencumbered by the deadweight of student-experience metrics and league tables that skew academic judgement. Covid-19 was an aberration, not a model for the future.

Hygiene theatre

Students are at university to learn – that is where a lecturer’s responsibility lies. But university is important in other ways too. For many, it is a unique period in their lives: free from the authority of parents and teachers, meeting new people from around the UK and the world, making friends and mistakes, learning from both. This has been lost. The conviviality of the campus was replaced by what some cynically labelled ‘hygiene theatre’ at university and ‘Zoom fatigue’ under lockdown from students’ bedrooms. My abiding memory going to teach my first socially distanced class was speaking to an upset, disorientated student, away from her east coast town for the first time, looking for her first-ever university class. All the potential excitement and opportunity to try new things and meet new people as she ventured into adulthood was replaced by masked strangers and a campus devoid of atmosphere and excitement.

Many lecturers, and indeed students too, have been sensitive to the impact lockdown is having on their students and peers. Mental-health services have been strained as isolation and the dispiriting effect of lockdown have kicked in. I hope that universities, communities and government will take this seriously, not only through the provision of good medical services, but also through promoting open, convivial and inspiring cultural events and speakers to ensure that students get back some of the opportunities they’ve missed out on over the Covid-19 period.

Celebrating our communities and educational obligations to one another would help to draw a line under Covid-19 and counter a residual legacy of loneliness and fear. Disconnection from one’s classmates and from the intellectual life of classes is likely to contribute to loneliness, depression and, in some cases, mental-health issues. As academics, our role can be to redouble our efforts to create a culture of powerful knowledge, inspiring ideas, crucial skills and excellence – a focus for us and our students through which they can be part of something unique that enables them to make and remake themselves and their society.

Financial abyss

Finally, the financial plight of universities is not a new issue, but Covid-19 has made this much worse. Lockdown created new concerns that student enrolments would fall as many felt online learning from a bedroom was simply not worth the money nor intellectually satisfying. International student fees – very important in most university balance sheets – have, of course, fallen away almost entirely. University of Exeter Vice-Chancellor Steve Smith stated that universities were ‘looking over the edge into a very significant financial abyss’. Another view of the business of higher education argues that while all stakeholders are likely to do whatever they can to avert insolvencies, that may include ‘making the difficult decisions that previously were not palatable, such as compulsory redundancy programmes or alliances … or mergers’. Some have called on the government to bail out the universities, as they have with other important industries. Universities may find the government willing to act as lender of the last resort, but with an expectation of severe cost cutting.

During Covid-19, universities have pushed on with restructuring – and job losses – in areas they see as not delivering financially or strategically. This has been doubly difficult to take for staff who may have been working hard to adapt to online learning and spent a great deal of time over and above that contracted hours trying to ensure their students were keeping up with their course. It is heartening that some universities’ staff have pushed back on redundancy plans. The next few years could be very difficult for lecturers and our union.

Making amends

The experience of Covid-19 has been a disaster for education. Good formal grades in part mask that reality. I am also concerned that the experience of lockdown feeds into longer-term cultural trends that militate against us coming back together as an educational community. The social distancing imposed to avoid a virus may leave a legacy of wariness and fear. We also have the less tangible threat of a sort of cultural distancing implicit in today’s campus identity politics that tend towards defining us by our differences rather than what we have in common – these, unfortunately, have continued apace regardless of Covid-19. Trust, conviviality and freedom of expression need to be affirmed if our students’ potential and that of universities is to be met.

We can make amends. We can make sure a ‘new normal’ places our duty to educate and academic freedom at the top of the list of priorities. No one should have to accept ‘this is how you “deliver” your course’, or ‘here’s how you assess your students’. Neither should we accept the job losses proposed in line with corporate restructuring. Drawing a line under Covid-19 means also challenging some of the trends that have accelerated over the period of the pandemic, but long predate it.

Jim Butcher

University lecturer

Jim Butcher is reader, Christ Church Business School, Canterbury Christ Church University. He has written a number of books and articles looking at tourism: its critics, the claims made for it and why mass tourism should be celebrated in spite of the naysayers.

He has also written on a diverse subjects including citizenship, free speech, decoloniality and education. His latest book is Volunteer Tourism: the lifestyle politics of international development (Routledge, 2015).

Jim is also a union rep in the University College Union (UCU) and volunteers with a charity for young asylum seekers.

Follow Jim on Twitter: @jimbutcher2